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Political Wisdom: Debating Libya and U.S. Policy

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WSJ Staff

Sep 13, 2012 10:03 am ET

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The killings of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, at a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, turned up tensions across the Mideast and raised questions about U.S. policy in the region after the Arab Spring. U.S. officials said the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens was possibly premeditated.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jay Solomon says Tuesday’s attacks in Libya and at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt, put the U.S. policy of supporting democratically elected governments in the region, despite the power of religious extremists, “at a crossroads.” Also at the WSJ, Laura Meckler and Carol E. Lee write that the crisis sparked a debate on the campaign trail, “with Mr. Romney using the episode to escalate his argument that the president is an overeager apologist and Mr. Obama to charge that his Republican foe ‘seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.’”

If the broader Republican coalition didn’t exactly dive into the breach with Romney on Wednesday, some Romney surrogates argued that this is a potentially important moment for Romney to deliver a larger national security critique of the president…

Republicans traditionally have a foreign policy edge, but in this cycle, that and counterterrorism are among the areas where Obama’s polling numbers are the highest despite war weariness among voters. Republicans said Wednesday that the unraveling of the situation in Cairo and Benghazi could be an important corrective to Obama’s triumphal national security narrative…